I remember buying close out TZ's and CV's from Williams back then. I wish I had a time machine so I can get some more.

I remember CV being closed out for cheap, but I never knew that TZ had that issue. AFAIK TZ was always a good earning machine (though prone to breakdowns).

TZ was a disaster for ops. It broke quickly and broken games don’t earn.

Williams blew out THOUSANDS of TZs at close out prices. They made way too many of them due to the success of TAF and paid the price.

People don’t want to accept it, but TZ really was the beginning of the end in the 90s

If anyone still has any at those closeoutz I'm a buyer

This blows my mind, as I really enjoy the game.

Ok so the week this game came out it was out on the floor- line to play etc. Go there a few days later- machine is not even on the floor. A week later machine is back but it has out-of-order sign on it waiting for gumball machine parts (?). Few weeks later it was finally available to play, but it had numerous other issues that had not been sorted, my guess is because it just had not received enough play for the op to work out any of the "early" issues. This is just one arcade but I know that TZ never was routed there much after that. Don't even know if I played a reasonable "player" until several years later at other arcades.

Another thing to remember was that not all op's were electronic experts and could track some of these issues easily.

Also, we just buy a better. clock board, or whatever else we need.

That stuff was unimaginable back then. Some ops drilled holes to vent the clock and hoped for the best.

We all love the game, you just have to remember it was a different time. The number one goal of games back then was just to make money/stay running so they could continue to earn. Also the overwhelming majority of pinball players were just random people popping in quarters, not really understanding that games have rules and whatnot. Actual pinball players that wanted to explore the depths a game had to offer were quite rare. Twilight Zone was just too complicated at the time and Williams gave Pat and his team Carte Blanche to do whatever they wanted after the success of Addams. If you ever listen to any of the Lawlor interviews from the 2000's when pinball was nearly completely dead he spoke many times about how doing what they did with TZ was a huge mistake and possibly caused the collapse of pinball all together. He also predicted that the industry would never recover, but I'm glad he ended up being mistaken about that. I really feel like this experience is what caused a lot of Pat's later games to lose a lot of the crazy magic we saw in some of his earlier titles.

Edit- I want to add that TZ did earn pretty well if you ever peruse old playmeters. It was just always a ton of hassles for operators and it never did just rake in cash like Addams. So even though it was a decently successful earner, a lot of the headaches weren't worth it in operator's minds.

I’ve reached out to some of the heavy hitter distributors on here. If any distributor has and is selling Rush (either level) at the discounted price, please let me know. Thanks!

Did anybody happen to see Jason Knapp's email blast earlier? One of them stated MORE price drops, and an IM was in the photo.

I hit the link, and the page was removed.

Pretty sure it was in reference to ICE/Home Arcade Games adverising $900 off, BUT it was $900 off of their inflated prices, bringing the cost down to the normal 6999 price. Shady? Absolutely.

Iron Maiden is not and has no plans to be on the sale price list of titles, Its still on the schedule for future runs. This "content" people need to stop with some of these rumors,

I saw those ads and thought it was incredibly shady. They tried to justify it in the comments but eventually just nuked all comments calling them out.

Huh? Did they change their mind about the last call?

I'm only reporting what I saw in an email, and the article was removed by the time I hit the link.

I never said that Maiden was being discounted. The article was about ICE providing fake discounts on marked up games. Some guy from Buffalo, their home turf, started going nuts on me in the comments and it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Honestly I wish you had left the article up, but I understand why you removed it. The thing is there are a lot of places that sell games for over MSRP. Often these are not distributors (although sometimes they are), but they are retail shops that sell stuff for rich folks to put in their homes. Spa's, pool tables, ect. This type of buyer is usually not in tune with what the MSRP actually is on these machines and are just there because its a shop where they can buy luxury goods for their homes. Its not even usual that these places are paying MSRP or close to it from a distributor and then putting the item out on their showroom floor. Its debatable whether this is scummy or not, and I personally lean toward not that scummy. Its just a foolish place to purchase a pinball machine from. Their sale probably wasn't even technically fake, I bet they do sell the games for those higher prices fairly often, and lowered them back down to MSRPish for the holidays. There certainly is an interesting discussion to be had there, and of course you had good intentions.

Its funny I got the same FB ad, so I bet FB's algorithm sent it out to a lot of people who are actually in tune with the hobby and it backfired on the company.

Any new thoughts on topic? Any rumors?

Amazon has AIQ Prem for $9100 free shipping direct from Stern. Probably ain't moving the needle much, but it is another Prem that's below MSRP.

Those sell used for high 7s, so not blowing my mind, but a good start.

I just checked amazing and couldn’t find avengers on there at all. How are you searching?

https://www.amazon.com/Stern-Pinball-Avengers-Machine-Connected/dp/B0B354JJGP/ref=sr_1_5

Discounted Venom Premium...

Venon-Premium (resized).jpg

Unfortunately the $500 shipping brings it back up to a typical price.

I think it's more about if Stern is allowing them to lower the price officially on Venom.

But but...it was the #2 game on the Top 100 just last week!

Venom needs a discount says the secondary.